Bazin article

At the beginning of this article, the author broke down the visual components of a movie into two categories: mis-en-scene, which for some unexplained reason he called "plastics" (maybe because it involves physically changeable elements?) and montage. The first two types of montage he described (parallel montage and accelerating montage) made perfect sense, but the third type, "montage by attraction" seemed very vague to me. His explanation by example of "the milk overflowing" did not help to clarify this concept for me. The author then went on to talk about the creation of meaning through juxtaposition of images, referencing Kuleshov's first experiment. He used these examples to argue that cinema had plenty of ways to express its point before sound came along. I think the author's next point was that with the arrival of sound, film changed to become more "realistic" in terms of style. However, he then seemed to contradict his earlier statement that cinema had everything it needed before sound, by saying that after the addition of sound, the technical requirements for cinema were all available.

In the middle of the article, the author talked about certain cinematic techniques, such as associative montage and trick shots like superimposition, falling by the wayside due to the new trend towards realism. The montage technique was challenged at this time by the deep focus shot, as seen in the still shots of Citizen Kane and the panning shots of Renoir's films. According to the author, shots with greater depth of focus are more realistic, and require more active participation from the audience. However, the use of deep focus shots did not negate the importance of montage entirely.

In the final three paragraphs, the author tried his best to state his thesis, though his language was at times confusing. As far as I could tell, his position was that the arrival of film sound worked well with realistic films but not with those films that relied heavily on montage, metaphors and symbols. With sound, the author seemed to say, metaphor created by montage became superfluous.

The thing I found most frustrating about this article was the way whole sentences seemed to be cut off between the bottom of one page and the top of the next. This made it very difficult to read and to follow the author's logic.